Present industrial tools, designed for continuous analysis of a process in real time, are poorly adapted to cases in which it is necessary to identify significant events in the course of the process observed, and to take into account the temporal relations between these events and make inferences about them.
For certain of these tools, the events overseen are analyzed relative to the past, which necessarily requires the archiving of a large quantity of information. Although this atemporal treatment suffices in certain cases, it is inadequate as soon as real-time recognition of sequences of events and knowing whether they meet time constraints is involved.
Other systems enable the detection of events by a series of tests repeated constantly over the course of time. The weakness of this approach is that these tests take place indefinitely after the delays fixed by the time constraints have passed. This inevitably reduces the overall efficiency of such systems.